Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The Power Industry calls for a
complete switch into the next generation through automation. Despite monetary
issues, power utilities need to begin with basic automation systems eventually
upgrading to the advanced systems. By
analyzing the growing power demand and market competence, this is the only way-forward
for the domestic power industry. The implementation of Smart Grid is not going
to be an easy task as the Indian power sector poses a number of issues such as minimizing T&D losses, power
theft, inadequate grid infrastructure, low metering efficiency and lack of
awareness.

Power theft: Power theft has been one of the major issues in India. A few ways to help prevent the
power theft are the use of overhead lines that are insulated and the LT
overhead wires used for distribution of power
could be replaced with insulated cables in order to minimize the theft
of energy through hooking. The conventional energy meters could be replaced
with digital tamper proof meters and the use of prepaid card is yet another solution to eradicate theft of
energy.

Inadequate
Grid Infrastructure:
For India to continue along its path of aggressive economic growth, it needs to
build a modern, intelligent grid. It is only with a reliable, financially
secure Smart Grid that India can provide a stable environment for investments
in electric infrastructure - a prerequisite to fixing the fundamental problems
with the grid.

Low metering efficiency: The commercial losses are mainly
due to low metering efficiency, theft & pilferage. This may be eliminated
by improving metering efficiency, proper energy accounting & auditing and
improved billing & collection efficiency. Fixing of accountability of the
personnel / feeder managers may help considerably in reduction of AT&C
loss.

Lack of awareness:The
understanding of consumers on how power is delivered to their homes is very minimal. Before implementing Smart Grid concepts, they
should be educated about the Smart Grids,
the benefits of Smart Grid and Smart Grid’s contribution to low carbon economy.
Consumers should be made aware about their energy consumption pattern at home,
office etc. Utilities need to focus on the overall capabilities of Smart Grids
rather than mere implementation of smart meters. Policy makers and regulators
must be very clear about the future prospects of Smart Grids.

Smart Grid being an expensive affair, in your view, how should India tackle the
financing challenge?

The major challenge for implementing
smart Grid in India is availability of funds. Huge investments are required in
order to setup a link between the customers and the Smart Grid. The cost of
setting up more plants can be deferred drastically. At that point of time, more
emphasis will be on overall development of T&D efficiency based on demand
response, load control and many other Smart Grid technologies. With timely and
detailed information provided by Smart Grids, customers would be encouraged to
avoid over use, adopt energy-efficient building standards and invest
continually in energy efficient appliances. To tackle the Smart Grid future, we need to
have compelling Smart Grid consumer
products, collaborative vendor partnerships and a willing investment community. The
policy makers and regulators have to
implement a robust incentive model frame work
to attract more and more private investments keeping the rate of return,
based on the output generated. Policy makers and regulators can mitigate
this by seeking economies of scale and implementing advanced digital
technologies.

What role does IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) have for smart grid
development in India?

India
is ranked as the third largest market for smart grid investments. Smart grid is
a strategic area of focus for IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA). Through India
Smart Grid Task Force, an initiative of Ministry of Power, India, IEEE-SA have
been able to create an initial momentum in this area. The India Smart Grid Task
Force is an inter ministerial group and serves as a government focal point for
activities related to Smart Grid.

To
drive the smart grid development in India, IEEE-SA is dedicated to working with
industry professionals, academia and government officials. A Standards Interest
Group (SIG) for India has been formed as the first step and it provides a
platform for the Indian technical community to participate in global standards
development. As one of the world's leading standards development organizations,
IEEE-SA acts as a catalyst to bring standards developed in India on a global
scale. In addition to standards development, IEEE-SA is focusing on creating
awareness and educating about smart grid through various workshops and panel
discussions across the country. Efforts are being made in India to create a collaborative
environment which will work towards setting global standards wherein deployment of interoperable
technologies using the Smart Grid will become a reality faster.

What are the key achievements, actions and initiatives of IEEE-SA in
India?

IEEE-SA
is actively growing its engagement in India to educate, and promoting Smart
Grid Standards interests in the country. With the formation of Standards
Interest Group (SIG) for India, IEEE-SA has successfully engaged India and its
professional technical community in global standards development including
those for the Smart Grid. Outreach programs like Smart Grid workshops
deliberating the role of standards and challenges in the Indian context are
also being conducted across cities. IEEE-SA have
conducted outreach programs to directly interact with Indian companies in order to focus
on the field of power, communications and information technology, to solicit
their interest to participate in IEEE standards projects.

Smart Grid Cyber security being a major challenge- what impact, according to
you, will Standards have on the Smart Grid Cyber Security?

With the transition to digital electricity infrastructure
comes the challenge of communication security and data management; as digital
networks are more prone to malicious attacks from software hackers, security
becomes the key issue to be addressed.
Smart Grid success depends on the successful handling of two major IT
issues, i.e security & integration
and data handling. With an increase in computers and communication networks the threat
of cyber-attack has also increased invariably. Utilities can use and implement
cyber security standards to reduce the venerability to the consumers and
provide a higher reliability that their valuable information is being
protected. Implementing cyber security measure through the use of standards
will help reduce software and implementation cost.

As it is observed, there has been certain degree of backlash and apprehension
to Smart Grid implementation in developed countries, particularly in the USA.
How do you think a country like India with its vast diversity and political
complexities should address these issues?

IEEE-SA is closely working with groups in India, such
as the engineering community including vendors, utilities, academics to
participate in the standards development and work towards implementing smart grid
successfully in India. Also having the technical participant from India provide
requirement to ensure standards development groups to understand and identify
any possible gaps and address some of India technical issue. Also because of
the challenges that India has, a more robust grid will be welcomed.

Friday, August 3, 2012

The IEEE Standards Association
(IEEE-SA), a globally recognized standards setting body within IEEE, today
announced that it has become an associate member of the India Smart Grid Forum
(ISGF) promoted by Ministry of Power, Govt. of India. The membership will allow
IEEE-SA to attend forum meetings and participate in initiatives driven by the
forum. The growing role in the Indian smart grid market is in line with the
stated commitment of IEEE-SA to play a macro role in evolving the right
ecosystem for effective smart grid implementation here. IEEE-SA will bring its
deep standards related knowledge and arising perspectives to the deliberations
at the forum and thus make it more holistic. IEEE-SA has been continually
investing over the past two years in creating wider awareness of Smart Grid as
a concept and also in bringing multiple stakeholders together to transfer best
practices and knowledge from other Smart Grid markets worldwide.

Commenting
on the membership, Bill Ash, Strategic Program Manager, IEEE Standards
Association, said “We believe ISGF is the apt platform for the facilitating
role we have chosen to play and are pleased to be the first association to become
a member. The membership marks a significant step forward in our growing
engagement with the Indian Smart Grid market. Beyond participation, we will
actively contribute and help ISGF achieve the objectives it has set for
itself.”

IEEE-SA
has launched key standards and guidelines such as the IEEE 2030®
Smart Grid Interoperability Guide, the first such standard that aids
interoperability of energy, information and communications technologies; IEEE
1547TM, the first guide for implementation of Microgrids and the
IEEE 1901TM standard for Broadband over Power Line. More standards
are in the pipeline providing among the most comprehensive, globally accepted
and validated set of standards that enable better interoperability, connection,
communication and management of the various elements that go into a Smart Grid.
Currently, IEEE-SA has over 100 standards and standards-in-development spanning
the entire Smart Grid spectrum.

About
ISGF:

The
India Smart Grid Forum is a non-profit voluntary consortium of public and
private stakeholders formed with the objective of helping Indian power sector
to deploy Smart Grid technologies in an efficient, cost-effective, innovative
and scalable manner by bringing together all the key stakeholders and enabling
technologies. Visit http://173.201.177.176/isgf/
for more information.

About
the IEEE Standards Association:

The
IEEE Standards Association, a globally recognized standards setting body within
IEEE, develops consensus standards through an open process that engages
industry and brings together a broad stake holder community. IEEE standards set
specifications and best practices based on current scientific and technological
knowledge. The IEEE SA has a portfolio of over 900 active standards and more
than 500 standards under development. For more information visit http://standards.ieee.org/.

About
IEEE:

IEEE,
the world’s largest technical professional association, is dedicated to
advancing technology for the benefit it to humanity. Through its highly cited
publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and
educational activities, IEEE is the trusted voice on a variety of areas ranging
from a aerospace systems, computer sand telecommunications to bio medical
engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Learn more at http://www.ieee.org.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

In this modern era when everything runs on electricity, power is a lifeline, without it, life is unthinkable and unsustainable. This was well experienced by more than 620 million (roughly 10% of the world population) people in India by two successive power blackouts. Trains, metros, traffic lights, and many essential service halted which caused chaos everywhere. People traveling were stranded on railway station, metros, bus stop or on the road, water delivering system stopped, miners were trapped in mines, no Air-conditioning or even fans in this intense heat. With all sort of in-convenience and pains, the financial and productivity loss is yet to be counted, which may be massive when the figures are released. The swath of more than 2000 miles from the border of Pakistan to the border of Myanmar was affected. By many expert this is probably the world's worst power blackouts, In India where brown-outs are so common in day to day life, many essential services like hospitals, airports police stations, and some businesses were well equipped with backup power to carry out their operations normally.

NY Times reported, "The country which is considered rising economic power this massive electric grid failure was an embarrassing reminder how intractable problems are still plauging India : Inadequate infrastructure, crippling power shortage, and according to many critics and yawning absence of governmental action and leadership."

Power outage affected regions (courtesy: NewYork Times)

What caused two successive power failures in northern and eastern India is yet to be known, which may take several months to figure out, and as per Reuters, it may never be precisely known as it is a complex process. Nonetheless, various media reports and experts revealed that possibly and most likely reason could be overdrawing of power by certain states due to excessive demands which is attributed to high heat and below par monsoon which prompted farmers to run electric motors to water their dying crops. In essence it is a demand-supply issue. Even in normal scenario, India has peak power shortage of 10.2%, according to recent government report.

On one end, the below normal moonsoon and excessive heat created unprecedented scenario that skyrocket demand, whereas on other end the low level of water in dams would have reduced energy output causing huge demand -supply gap. This would have caused failure in one regional location that generated cascading effect in whole transmission and distribution network. According to www.interferencetechnology.com, the director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, said, “The increasing gap between electricity supply and demand has long been a
matter of concern,”

Though government has taken series of steps to increase the generation capacity, it has lagged behind its own five-year target plans. While, there are more than 300 million people who are yet to receive electricity in India; the demand is increasing day by day due to host of factors; such as higher growth - which requires more energy due to increase in economic activities and better quality life, climate change - causing unusual weather condition again needs more electricity to maintain normal temperature, Populist politics - offering free electricity, this is causing wastage of energy. In addition to this, almost 30 -50% generated power is lost due to theft and other technical and non-technical factors.

Over the years, the generation capacity has increased, however such complex challenges cannot be handled just by increasing the generation. A variety of urgent measures are needed to overcome the various challenges that are spreading like a wildfire.

Smart Grid is such a solution, which intends tackle all aspect of energy from generation to distribution to utilization. According to Wikipedia, "Asmart gridis anelectrical gridthat uses computers and other technology to gather and act on information, such as information about the behaviors of suppliers and consumers, in an automated fashion to improve the efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of the production and distribution of electricity."

While, the developed economies are adopting smart grid for greater reliability and sustainability, for countries like India it is indeed a necessity. As pointed out by the Samir Sachdev in GovernanceNow, "Had there been a smart grid, this crisis could have been easily been
avoided. A smart grid would have shared the data in real-time which
would have helped to instantaneously identify the fault. Smart grid
would have also initiated self-healing and would have cordoned the fault
line and restricted the impact of the failure." Mr. Sam Pitroda, the chairman of India Smart Grid Task Force (ISGTF) said, "While it
may be difficult to guarantee perfect power availability, in the
current context, we can at least replace blackouts with brown-outs by
providing a basic threshold of power to all households, with which to
run at least a few key appliances.” as reported by GovernanceNow.com.

In recent past, the government has taken series of steps to address various issues plauging the energy sector, such as rolling out R-APDRP program in 2004, Setting up India Smart Grid Task Force and India Smart Grid Forum, National Energy Efficiency Mission, however this development are moving at its own pace.

Though Smart Grid may be a panacea for the India's ailing power-grid and energy sector, according to Rajit Gadh, who founded UCLA's Smart Grid Energy Research Center, "India’s first challenge is to make the vast grid easier to
monitor, so that engineers can spot the cause of an outage quickly --
even in advance." "When you have less data coming in about the grid, there is less
number of things you can do and you are often shooting in the dark,"
says Gadh as reported by scpr.org.

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Crompton Greaves (CG), the flagship company of Avantha Group, which is into business of power equipments and consumer durables has acquired Spanish smart grid automation company ZIV Groups for $185 million (Rs. 1015 Crore). The Mumbai based company is India largest and world's 10th largest transmission and distribution equipment maker company. Since 2005, it has acquired 10 companies to expand its business and market and now operates in 21 countries. With this acquisitions, the company has expanded its product portfolio and now broadly operates in three business segments - power systems, industrial systems, and consumer goods.

With its 11th purchase the ZIV group, CG intends to expand business operation into the emerging sector of Smart Grid. ZIV, which provides digital equipment for grid automation and Advanced Metering Infrastructure has so far installed 1.4 million IEDs for utilities and industries across the world. With operations in more than 50 countries, ZIV Group has significant presence in Brazil, Spain, India, and the USA.

The Smart Grid market is set to reach €90 billion by 2020, which represent important market opportunity for emerging company like Compton Greaves which has global ambition to become leader in its segment. Furthermore, its transmission and distribution offerings may well complement with ZIV's grid automation product that will enable the company to offer complete suit of products to its clients.

According to CEO of ZIV Group Mr Norberto Santiago Elustondo, “We feel very confident about the next phase of our relationship with
CG as we know very well our colleagues as a result of the Joint Venture
in India. This development will be a catalyst to grow the ZIV activities
in new parts of the World Market. By this fusion with CG, together we
will get the most from ZIV’s innovative technology”.

About Crompton Greaves:

CG is a pioneering leader in the management and application of
electrical energy. CG operates globally, is present in 21 countries and
employs more than 12000 employees. CG provides electrical products,
systems and services for Utilities, Power Generation, Industrial and
Consumers. The company is organized into three business groups: Power,
Industrial and Consumer. Nearly, two-thirds of its turnover accrues
from Product Lines in which it enjoys a leadership position. CG is a
part of the US$ 4 Bn Avantha Group. The Avantha Group has an impressive
global footprint and comprises 8 successful, diverse entities.